• • • low end theory

“White femininity which, in the antebellum South, works as an aesthetic representation of gender at the cost of almost total disembodiment of white women, functions as a central defining moment of white dominance, as visceral allegory of an unassailable white gentility. This in turn is made possible by ascribing to black female slaves a status of pure flesh, so to speak (in the sense of sexual and reproductive accessibility and functionality). The Deep South needed female whiteness in order to allegorize racial difference, but its livelihood depended on making this allegory materially visible and physically effective. It thus granted white women an agency of being white that was based on an authoritative privilege of gender which could only, by necessity — since equity within patriarchy was out of the question — have slaves as its defining object. The possession of a white gender subjectivity was bound to owning black objects — materially or symbolically, female gender could only exist, and thus support the white power structure, only because and if female slaves were split off from it.”

- Sabine Bröck, “Property: White Gender and Slavery”